Have you been to the post office recently? The only times you go to the post office these days are when you send a Yu-Pack or buy New Year's cards. I think you go a few times a year. Of course, for people living on remote islands, the post office also serves as a sort of bank, so there are probably some who go there almost every day, but for many people, the post office has become a place they rarely go to.
What was it like before the Internet? I think the post office was used for many different types of communication, such as sending letters, buying stamps, and companies sending notices to customers. With the advent of the Internet, most communication is done over the Internet, and people rarely send letters or go to the post office anymore.
With the advent of Bitcoin, I think we will enter an era where we will use banks less and less in the future. Here, I will consider the importance of Bitcoin in the framework of "mail vs. email" and "money such as yen and US dollars vs. Bitcoin."
Postal mail vs. email
Postal mail and email/messenger are essentially means of communication with the same purpose, but there are significant differences in how they operate.
Postal services are provided by post offices in Japan and by the Universal Postal Union , which determines the rules and procedures for sending mail from Japan to the rest of the world. To send mail, you take it to a post office, buy a stamp (which essentially means paying a fee to the post office), and the post office delivers the letter to the recipient. Here, the post office manages the distribution of all letters and keeps track of who sent which letters and who received which letters in the process.
On the other hand, there is no organization or group that manages the sending of email. Although you have a contract with an Internet provider to connect to the Internet, the provider only connects you to the Internet and does not provide email sending or receiving services. When you send an email with Gmail, Google only provides the email sending and receiving software service, and you can send and receive email regardless of what email software the recipient is using.
Since email is sent directly to the recipient over the Internet, a person in Japan can send email to a friend in America without getting permission from anyone. If email were like postal mail, there would be a company called "Japan Email Company" that manages email, and email sent in Japan would be sent to Japan Email Company, and from there to "US Email Company" in America, and from there it would arrive at the friend's email address in America... That's how it would be. If you don't pay fees to "Japan Email Company" and "US Email Company", you won't be able to open your email... That's how inconvenient it is.
Yen, US Dollar, and other currencies vs Bitcoin
Just like the relationship between "post" and "email," there is a similar relationship between "money such as yen and US dollars" and "Bitcoin."
The issuance and management of yen and US dollars is done by a central bank (Bank of Japan for yen, Federal Reserve for US dollars) or a government. This means that ordinary money like yen and US dollars, like postal service, is also managed by a single organization like a central bank. The central bank decides the amount of money to be issued and adjusts the amount of money in circulation according to the economic situation.
On the other hand, there is no organization that issues and manages Bitcoin. This is similar to email. Email information is traded directly on the Internet, and the exchange is delivered via multiple computers on the Internet. Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a digital ledger managed by multiple computers using a system called the blockchain. There is no central administrator for Bitcoin, and anyone can send and receive Bitcoin.
If you live only in Japan, when you use an internet bank to send money to another person in Japan, the money often arrives immediately, and recently you can use PayPay to make payments and transfers immediately, which is becoming more convenient. However, when it comes to sending money overseas, it is often not easy to do so with an internet bank. Furthermore, you cannot send money overseas with PayPay. As a result, remittance services such as Wise have emerged to make up for the inconvenience of sending money overseas. However, after paying the bank's fees and also the fees to Wise, the cost of sending money overseas does not decrease in the end.
If the time comes when Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are commonly used, I think we will enter a time when we will only visit bank branches a few times a year, just like we do with post offices today.
The Internet has made it easy and smooth for the flow of information and goods to cross borders, but it remains inconvenient for money to cross borders... This is the current situation. We believe that Bitcoin today is similar to when the Internet first appeared and email became widespread.
When email first came out, few people around me were using it, so I had to ask around if they had an email address, but once it became widespread, there was no going back to postal mail.
Unlike the flow of information and goods, changing the mechanism of money may not be that easy. However, we believe that sooner or later, we will reach a time when you hardly ever go to a bank, and when it will be normal to use Bitcoin or other virtual currencies to send money across borders.